Data storage commands often originate in applications that either make incorrect assumptions or are limited in their ability to make assumptions about the behavior or limitations of the underlying hardware and storage busses that hold the applications' data. These data storage commands are often decomposed into a series of hardware media commands that are interwoven with other hardware media commands over a period of time and passed to storage devices. As used herein, data storage commands are commands that request some operation on stored data. Examples of data storage commands include, but are not limited to, read commands, write commands, etc. A hardware media command is a type of data storage command that requests an operation on hardware storage media at either a source data location or a destination data location, but not both. Examples of hardware media commands include reading data from the media, writing data to the media, and finalizing data that has been written to the media. As an example of decomposition of a data storage command into hardware media commands, a copy storage operation may be decomposed into access hardware media commands that requests existing data from a source data location in a storage device, a write hardware media command that requests the storage device to write the data to a destination data location in the storage device, and another access hardware media command that requests the storage device to finalize the data written to the permanent media. Other related or unrelated hardware media commands may be interwoven between these three commands in ways that are unknown to the application and often unknown to the underlying operating system.